Cary Regional-NPR Readers Corner-Radio/Podcast

Explore the best in literature with NPR's Readers Corner. Discover new authors, dive into thought-provoking conversations, and find your next great read. From fiction to nonfiction, and everything in between, we've got you covered. Browse our curated selection of book reviews, author interviews, and reading recommendations to fuel your love of reading.

Showing 1 - 20 of 20  There are a total of 283 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "All fours"
Star rating for All fours
Average Rating:
3.4 stars
Description:
"A semi-famous artist announces her plan to drive cross-country from LA to NY. Twenty minutes after leaving her husband and child at home, she spontaneously exits the freeway, beds down in a nondescript motel, and immerses herself in a temporary reinvention that turns out to be the start of an entirely different journey"--
Book cover for "Audition"
Star rating for Audition
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. A mesmerizing Mobius strip of a novel that asks who we are to the people we love. Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an elegant and accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, and young-young enough to be her son. Who is he to her - and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing...
Book cover for "Baby X"
Star rating for Baby X
Description:
"In a world where any biological matter can be used to create life, stolen celebrity DNA sells to the highest bidder--or the craziest stalker"--
Book cover for "The beast you are"
Star rating for The beast you are
Average Rating:
4 stars
Description:
"A haunting collection of short fiction from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club, A Head Full of Ghosts, and The Cabin at the End of the World."--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "The compound"
Star rating for The compound
Description:
"Lily--a bored, beautiful twenty-something--wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles,...
Book cover for "The emperor of gladness"
Star rating for The emperor of gladness
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
One late summer evening in the post-industrial town of East Gladness, Connecticut, nineteen-year-old Hai stands on the edge of a bridge in pelting rain, ready to jump, when he hears someone shout across the river. The voice belongs to Grazina, an elderly widow succumbing to dementia, who convinces him to take another path. Bereft and out of options, he quickly becomes her caretaker. Over the course of the year, the unlikely pair develops a life-altering...
Book cover for "The extinction of Irena Rey"
Star rating for The extinction of Irena Rey
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Book cover for "The god of the woods"
Star rating for The god of the woods
Average Rating:
3.8 stars
Description:
"When Barbara Van Laar is discovered missing from her summer camp bunk one morning in August 1975, it triggers a panicked, terrified search. Losing a camper is a horrific tragedy under any circumstances, but Barbara isn't just any camper: she's the daughter of the wealthy family who owns the camp--as well as the opulent nearby estate, and most of the land in sight. And this isn't the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared in this region. Barbara's...
Book cover for "Intermezzo"
Star rating for Intermezzo
Average Rating:
3.2 stars
Description:
"An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family, from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney. Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common. Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties--successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father's death, he's medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women--his enduring...
Book cover for "Long Island compromise"
Star rating for Long Island compromise
Average Rating:
4.5 stars
Description:
"In [1980], a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher is kidnapped from his driveway in the nicest part of Long Island, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly the worse for wear, and the family begins the hard work of trying to move on with their lives and resume their prized places in the saga of the American dream, coming to understand that though their money may have been what...
Book cover for "Madwoman"
Star rating for Madwoman
Description:
"Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she's landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation. But when she receives a letter from a women's prison...
Book cover for "Mrs. Dalloway"
Star rating for Mrs. Dalloway
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
A poignant portrayal of the thoughts and events that comprise one day in a woman's life.
Book cover for "Nestlings"
Star rating for Nestlings
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"Ana and Reid needed a lucky break. The horrifically complicated birth of their first child has left Ana paralyzed, bitter, and struggling: with mobility, with her relationship with Reid, with resentment for her baby. That's about to change with the words any New Yorker would love to hear--affordable housing lottery. They've won an apartment in the Deptford, one of Manhattan's most revered buildings with beautiful vistas of Central Park and stunning...
Book cover for "Poor deer"
Star rating for Poor deer
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"A wondrous, tender novel about a young girl grappling with her role in a tragic loss--and attempting to reshape the narrative of her life"--
Book cover for "Rabbit moon"
Star rating for Rabbit moon
Average Rating:
3.5 stars
Description:
"Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks' marriage...
Book cover for "Sidle Creek"
Star rating for Sidle Creek
Description:
"Set in the bruised, mined, and timbered hills of Appalachia in western Pennsylvania, Sidle Creek is a tender, truthful exploration of a small town and the people who live there..."--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "Sleep"
Star rating for Sleep
Author:
Description:
"From a dazzling new talent, the story of a newly divorced young mother forced to reckon with the secrets of her own childhood when she brings her daughters back to the opulent house where she was raised. Every parent exists inside of two families simultaneously - the one she was born into, and the one she has made. Ten-year-old Margaret hides beneath a blackberry bush in her family's verdant backyard while her brother hunts for her in a game of flashlight...
Book cover for "A talent for murder"
Star rating for A talent for murder
Description:
"Martha Ratliff conceded long ago that she'd likely spend her life alone. She was fine with it, happy with her solo existence, stimulated by her job as an archival librarian, constantly surrounded by thought-provoking ideas and the books she loved. But then she met Alan, a charming and sweet-natured divorcee with a job that took him on the road for half the year. When he asked her to marry him, she said yes, even though he still felt a little bit...
Book cover for "Vantage point"
Star rating for Vantage point
Notes:
A mystery novel combining elements of tech thriller and gothic horror, set on a secluded island.
Description:
"Succession meets Beware the Woman in this seductive, Gothic suspense novel about the dramatic downfall of one of America's most affluent (and cursed) families"--
Book cover for "Whale fall"
Star rating for Whale fall
Average Rating:
5 stars
Description:
"In 1938, a dead whale washes up on the shores of remote Welsh island. For Manod, who has spent her whole life on the island, it feels like both a portent of doom and a symbol of what may lie beyond the island's shores. A young woman living with her father and her sister (to whom she has reluctantly but devotedly become a mother following the death of their own mother years prior), Manod can't shake her welling desire to explore life beyond the beautiful...